First Star/Milky Way Attempt

I have been wanting to try some Star/Milky Way shots, got round to it last night, I stay in a reasonably built up area with plenty of street lights so I'm surprised it came out seemingly as well as it did.
XT10 18mm at F2 ISO 800 17sec on tripod.

The focus infinity setting on the 18mm is way out, you need to manually focus using the zoom in feature, almost in line with the 10m distance mark on the rear screen is about spot on.

I'm new to astrophotography so I would appreciate tips and criticisms.

One question I have is it seems that getting tack sharp images of stars is not really possible, even if you nailed focus, used a tripod and short enough time to prevent star trails it'll look like a bit of a mess when you zoom in/pixel peep?

I am surprised that you got so much detail with ISO800 and 17s. Where do you live? Is the sky really dark there?

Click to expand...

I was also surprised, I don't live in a particularly dark location, it's a suburb in a town in South Africa's Garden Route, it was on the new moon so almost no moonlight.
The dehaze setting in Lightroom and a few tone adjustments did help, the images were pretty flat/boring looking RAW files straight out of the camera but I'm assuming that is almost always going to be the case with astro pics.

Tried Startrails this evening, very easy to combine the images with a free program called Starstax: Please login or register to view links
One thing to consider is it's better to have less stars in the sky to insure clearly defined individual star trails, pics of the milky way just show a sky obliterated with star trails.